As everyone keeps saying, Angelina Jolie is back to feeling good about life and feeling good about herself. It took three years, basically. Angelina has been promoting Maleficent: Mistress of Evil all over the world for weeks, and she’s been making a lot of public comments as she does press for the film. Her quotes, taken together, kind of reveal that Angelina spent 2014-2016 in a bad place. Those were her final years with Brad Pitt, and she was deeply unhappy. In the wake of their split, Jolie says she was not feeling strong, especially not strong enough to play Maleficent again:

Angelina Jolie had to work to find the strength to play Maleficent again in the upcoming sequel. Jolie put the horns back on last summer to shoot Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, which comes out this Friday, marking her first acting role in four years.

“It was a tough time,” Jolie tells PEOPLE of returning to the character in this week’s issue. “I’d been coming off a few years of difficulty, and I was not feeling very strong. In fact, I was feeling pretty broken. It took me a moment to feel the strength of [Maleficent] again.”

Jolie, 44, shares six children with her ex-husband Brad Pitt, 55: daughters Zahara, 14, Shiloh, 13, and Vivienne, 11, and sons Maddox, 18, Pax, 15, and Knox, 11. But while her six kids hung around in London with their mom during most of the shoot, Jolie couldn’t get them to appear on screen this time. Even Vivienne, Jolie’s youngest daughter who appeared as a young Aurora in the 2014 original, wasn’t into it.

“I tried,” Jolie says. “Viv still can’t believe I made her a princess. None of my kids want to be actors. [They’re into] business, humanitarian affairs, things like that. Nobody was interested!”

[From People]

“I was not feeling very strong. In fact, I was feeling pretty broken.” Two years after the Jolie-Pitt split, she still felt broken. Keep in mind that during pre-production and production on Mistress of Evil, Brad and his team continued to smear Angelina because she was… taking care of the kids in London. Anyway, I love that her kids couldn’t care less about being in the movie with her. Vivienne was so cute as Toddler Aurora in the first film! And it made me laugh because Angelina sounded like such a stage parent when she talked about trying to get Vivienne to do “act” as Aurora. I wish at least one of the kids wanted to be in the second movie!

Photos courtesy of WENN.